I always thought it was a pretty smart idea on Reddit’s side to have the posts and comments be automatically upvoted by their author, saving them the tough choice between playing fair or boosting their initial reach a little; and if you had particularly low self-esteem, this enabled you to reduce your own points by not one, but two, by self-downvoting.
Here, both upvotes and downvotes (or rather, favourites and reduces) start at 0, and you have the option to upvote your post manually (which I’ve already seen some people do) - which, while currently does not increase your reputation, does give you that small initial boost by making it look like people are starting to engage with your post.
What do you think - should the posts and comments be automatically upvoted by the author? If not, are you fine with people upvoting themselves, or do you feel it’s unfair towards the ones that don’t do it?
I dont really care much for karma/reputation. I apreciate a reply more than the votes and I think the way it was done in reddit, used as a dislike/like button is wrong when it should have been a self moderating tool to filter the true, constructive discussions and conversations from trolls, meaningless and off-topic stuff.
For example. I used to browse a lot of r/horror and r/movies and it was impossible to have a conversation about the quality and merits of a movie. If the movie was popular enough, every comment disliking or criticizing it, no matter how well written it was or how valid their arguments might have been was downvoted to oblivion while some banal comment like “Shut up! Its a masterpiece” was top comment with hundreds of upvotes. The opposite happened if the topic was widely disliked.
Then comments and replies just becomes into a popularity contest and not about engaging with the communities.
That being said, I wont judge anyone who upvotes or boosts their contributions, you do you. And as this site grows it might even be needed to get an extra bit of visibility for new contributions.